Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature - the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 1962.
Tearing, tearing. I tore through the thicket of the Trees with laughter in my throat until I tripped upon a stone and found my head resting against the great green curve of the Earth. I was running until I was not. I was a child until I was not.
Dizzy and a little unsteady, I lifted my head from the soft verdant pillow and looked around, but all was not as I had known it to be before I had taken my fall. I thought perhaps I had slipped into sleep as I was laying upon the ground, and looked to the Sun to ascertain how long I had drifted unconscious, but found in the sky no Sun at all.
I could make no sense of it, but it appeared that whilst I lay in the boat of dreams someone had sought to remake the world; it was as though some great and callous hand had come and closed a fist around everything that was good and beautiful.
This world to which I woke I did not recognise — could find in it nothing that I knew nor nothing that I loved. Instead, I could see only shade and darkness and obscurity. Suddenly everything had been drained of life and writ grey. Where was the green pulse of beloved Earth in this cold, colourless place? Where was blue Sky, golden Sun? Where were the plants, and the creatures? Where was Fox, and Oak? Fern, and Swan? Where was the murmuring song of Stream, and the whisper of Wind in the leaves?
I looked around and listened with great consternation, but I could not see nor hear my friends, could not find that which was most familiar to my heart. Everywhere was road, and building, and pavement, and the whirring of motors and machines the only sound hammering through the air.
Concrete had stolen the radiance from the world and the face of every passerby appeared ashen, as though no one knew of Sun, or knew what it was to feel the freshets of fragrant Wind against their skin, or to gaze upon the aspect of a Flower and be happy for the sight. I tried to reach out to those who hurried by, pressed strangers for answers, pleaded with my fellow kind to tell me where I had found myself, where the animals and the plants had gone, but no one seemed to know of what or where or whom I spoke. They had forgotten. They had all forgotten how beautiful the world once was.
I could not swallow it, had no appetite for it; not for this faded place where all that I loved had vanished. The world was grey but my pillow was still green, so I slept for longer, longer still. I buried my face in the last remaining shroud of herbage and I closed my eyes and slept until a silent scream tore a hole in my dream and woke me once more. I was asleep until I was not. I was young until I was not.
Upon waking, I found myself among the others, standing amidst the towering spectres of concrete. I was marching head lowered alongside my fellow kind, and I had forgotten as they had — had forgotten what it was that I had searched for; had forgotten what it was that I had lost. I felt compelled by a strong anxiety to hurry, and hurry forth I did, my heels beating against a perpetual stretch of grey paving stones, but to where I must hurry I did not know. All of my previous impulses seemed to have slipped away — I no longer cared to walk slowly, no longer yearned to look skyward, no longer wished to listen closely for what I had once loved to hear. Even if I had wished to hear them, the Birds no longer sang, for Birds no longer lived in this place. Birds no longer existed, and the sky was empty of the miracle of wings in flight.
I looked down at my hands and found that they were pale, and had lost all of the strength and determination that they once knew. I wondered what I did with these strange, alien hands all day; wondered what it was that I could possibly be engaged with in this pallid place where the pulse of Life seemed so faint.
I tried to make sense of what had happened, and where I found myself, but the answers were not clear. I could not think straight. A heavy and indiscernible fog rested in my mind, and I felt I hardly knew myself; felt I was drifting untethered from something entirely essential. But what exactly I had strayed from, I could not say. What this emptiness in my chest was, I did not quite know.
I had become a stranger, but my body seemed to know how to fumble through this new world nonetheless, though it sparked no feeling in me, and moved not a single thing in my heart. So I did as the others did. I hurried forth into the shifting frames of grey, uninspired and alone, and slowly slipped away entirely into a throng of distant, drifting faces. No one spoke, no one uttered a word, we all simply moved silently onwards, not knowing where we had come from, nor where we were headed.
All of a sudden the resounding warble of a Robin pierced through the dream plane and brought me to in a start, and I found myself once more prostrate against the woodland floor that I knew so well. Overhead the Birds dived across a stretching Sky daubed with cotton cloud, and I was surrounded on every side by the silent bodies of Trees. I looked upon my hands and found them once more strong and supple, a little dirty at palm and fingertip, and gently marked by the turning of the Sun. I was alive once more, and had returned to the place for which I yearned.
The laughter of children came to my ears on the Wind as I lay back in the long feathers of Grass, and a Blackbird flushed forth his fluty song in the branches up above. I watched as a pair of friends walked arm in arm beneath the boughs of Oak, Ash, and Alder not far from where I lay. They turned their faces toward the sunlight that reached through the Trees and they smiled as one. Their quiet joy and companionship moved me, and I took a deep breath and remembered my place. It was here, among a green world where I, alongside my fellow kind, treaded gently and in reverence, befriending other creatures, occupying a steady place in a sacred web from which no being was excluded. We all had our place here.
I was lost until I was not. The world was grey until it was not, and from that moment I would never forget the dream from which I had awoken; this dream that came like an omen crying out a clarion call, “love the Earth, love the Earth, love the Earth!” In my heart I pledged never to forget, and to never stop loving and living in reverence of this place. To never forget the tragedy of forgoing green for grey. To never forget just how much there is to lose in straying so far from where we truly come.
The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity, and by these I shall not regulate my proportions; and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees.
— William Blake, from a letter to the Reverend John Trusler, 1799.
spring dispatch | 01 | 22.04.2024 | Rain has been a persistent caller throughout these early weeks of Spring, but inclement weather has not deterred a visiting Badger from returning to the field night after night whenever the floods subside. A covertly stashed camera has caught the fellow pushing a long snout into the damp grasses and rubbing his belly playfully over the last clumps of Daffodil. Nocturnal wanderer, silly Badger! I salute you and your quiet night-roving. The way you trace the arc of the star-pressed sky with your searching paths, and leave me wondering what the world is like when it is only known by the lamplight of Moon. Will you return in the coming weeks with a clan of cubs in tow, and their mother by your side?